A. Technical Field
The present invention pertains generally to data processing, and relates more particularly to data compression and decompression.
B. Background of the Invention
Data compression is the encoding of a data set so that fewer bits are necessary to represent the encoded data. Data compression is important for data communication, because the smaller compressed data sets require fewer resources for storage and also require less bandwidth for data transmission than would be required for the original uncompressed data sets.
Efficient data compression should address key issues. For example, it is possible to employ a data compression scheme that will result in information loss as the data are encoded. To maintain precision, a lossless data compression scheme is required. Data compression processing may require a large amount of computing resources such as memory, and the computing resources requirement may not scale when large data sets are being compressed. It is important for an application to employ efficient data compression methods in order to avoid excessive computing resources requirements.
In order to use data in a compressed data set, the compressed data set must first be decompressed (decoded). Data decompression is based on the same scheme that was used for data compression. In a typical communication system, a client device performs data compression on a transmitted compressed data package that it has received. Recently, a large variety of consumer electronics devices are being used as client devices, and these devices have limited computing resources. It is important that a data decompression scheme be both lossless and efficient to enable the widest variety of client devices to be used in data communication.